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Brief CV

Scott F. Gilbert is the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology at Swarthmore College, where he teaches developmental genetics, embryology, and the history and critiques of biology. He received his B.A. in both biology and religion from Wesleyan University (1971), and he earned his PhD in biology from the pediatric genetics laboratory of Dr. Barbara Migeon at the Johns Hopkins University (1976). His M.A. in the history of science, also from The Johns Hopkins University, was done under the supervision of Dr. Donna Haraway. He pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin in the laboratories of Dr. Masayasu Nomura and Dr. Robert Auerbach. Dr. Gilbert has been Chair of the Division of Developmental and Cell Biology of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and he is a member of the education committee of the Society for Developmental Biology. He has also been elected a fellow of the AAAS and the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists. He currently has three books in print:Developmental Biology (a textbook in its eighth edition), Bioethics and the New Embryology (a volume, co-authored with two students, that discusses new findings in developmental biology with respect to philosophy and religion), and Ecological Developmental Biology, a textbook co-authored with David Epel which integrates developmental plasticity, epigenetics, and symbiosis into discussions of medicine and evolution. Scott has received several awards, including the Medal of François I from the Collège de France, the Dwight J. Ingle Memorial Writing Award, the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award, an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant. In 2002, the Society for Developmental Biology awarded him its first Viktor Hamburger Prize for Excellence in Education, and in 2004, he was awarded the Kowalevsky Prize in Evolutionary Developmental Biology. He has recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to work on that most interesting of topics-how the turtle forms its shell-and he continues to do research and write in both developmental biology and in the history and philosophy of biology.Outside the class and laboratory, his interests include hiking, photography, and he plays piano in KNISH, one of Swarthmore's premier Klezmer bands.